First experience with Building Apps with Google AI Studio: Incredibly simple and intuitive.

Dev.to / 5/5/2026

💬 OpinionDeveloper Stack & InfrastructureTools & Practical Usage

Key Points

  • The author built a “hometown food slot machine” app that lets users choose a dish and uses AI to recommend the top three nearby options rated by Google.
  • They report that building the app with Google AI Studio felt incredibly simple and intuitive, even with only a brief and somewhat vague prompt.
  • Despite strong recommendation quality, the author found that the resulting visual style differed from what they expected.
  • Their next experiment will focus on learning how to describe the desired aesthetics more effectively in prompts.

This post is my submission for DEV Education Track: Build Apps with Google AI Studio.

What I Built

To tackle the age-old question of 'what should I eat today?', I created a hometown food slot machine. After picking a dish, the AI kicks in to find the top three Google-rated spots nearby. It’s a perfect blend of nostalgia and modern AI utility.

Demo

https://ai.studio/apps/602806f7-0641-4dfb-8067-6bd3bff41bcb

My Experience

I only provided a brief, 50-word description—admittedly unpolished and a bit vague—but the high-quality results still blew me away. However, the visual style ended up being quite different from what I had imagined. Figuring out how to better describe the aesthetic is definitely what I want to experiment with next.